Today, Tyler R. Tichelaar of Reader Views is pleased to be joined
by Roland Hughes, who is here to talk about his "The Minimum You Need
to Know" series, which includes "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an
Open VMS Application Developer," 1st Impression Publishing (2006), "The
Minimum You Need to Know About Logic to Work in IT," Logikal Solutions
(2007), and "The Minimum You Need to Know About Java on OpenVMS,"
Logikal Solutions (2006).
Roland Hughes is the president of
Logikal Solutions, a business applications consulting firm specializing
in VMS platforms. Hughes serves as a lead consultant with over two
decades of experience using computers and operating systems originally
created by Digital Equipment Corporation (now owned by Hewlett-Packard).
With
a degree in Computer Information Systems, the author's experience is
focused on OpenVMS systems across a variety of diverse industries
including heavy equipment manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, stock
exchanges, tax accounting, and hardware value-added resellers, to name a
few. Working throughout these industries has strengthened the author's
unique skill set and given him a broad perspective on the role and value
of OpenVMS in industry.
Mr. Hughes's technical skill sets include
the following tools that enable him to master and improve OpenVMS
applications: DEC/VAX C, DEC/VAX C++, DEC BASIC, DCL, ACMS, MQ Series,
DEC COBOL, RDB, POWERHOUSE, SQL, CMS/MMS, Oracle 8i, FORTRAN, FMS, and
Java, among others. Being fluent in so many technical languages enables
Hughes to share his knowledge more easily with other programmers. This
book series is an effort to pass along some of his insights and skills
to the next generation.
Tyler: Thank you for joining me today,
Roland. Would you tell us first what makes your books stand out from
other books about Java and VMS?
Roland: For OpenVMS, that's easy.
There are no other application development books currently in print for
it. There are quite a few systems management and integration books out
there for it, but none focusing on application development or even
language usage.
As to Java, I did not drink the kool-aid in Java
Town, and you won't find my body stacked in one of the piles being
discovered there. I work with Java when I have to. It is not, and should
never be the language of choice for anyone serious about application
development. My book on Java dives right into the hard stuff: Calling
system services, using run-time libraries, reading and writing RMS
indexed files, interacting with the user on a VT-320 terminal. You don't
find any other Java books talking about such things because their
authors don't grasp enough about the language to accomplish it.
Tyler:
You said Java "should never be the language of choice for anyone
serious about application development." Why is that, and why do you
think other authors have difficulty grasping it?
Roland: One has
to define first "serious application development." While the WEB may
become a serious portion of income for many businesses, it should never
be serious application development. All of the serious application
development occurs on the back end. We now call this SOA. You put a tiny
little WEB service up which makes a secure call to a back end process
that actually does all of the work.
Java is unfit for back end
server development for the same reason almost all 4GL tools were unfit.
They are interpreted. OK, they are p-compiled and that is interpreted.
You cannot get enough performance, robustness, and security from an
interpreted tool set.
If you look at most SOA implementations now,
they are putting little WEB services up which communicate via some
proprietary messaging system to a pre-existing back end which was
written in COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, or some other language the trade press
has long forgotten about.
Your question is its own answer: "Why
do you think other authors have difficulty grasping it?" They are
authors, not professional software developers. They are paid by a
marketing war chest that has funneled money to one of the large
publishers. The large publisher gives them a $4k-$5k advance and tells
them to drink the Kool-aid with this book. They also tell them they have
to put out 5 additional books this year per their contract. Exactly how
much skill, knowledge, and research goes into any technology book put
out by a large publishing house? Zero. They are busy churning out
oatmeal for the masses.
When I wrote "The Minimum You Need to Know
to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" I took an unpaid year off to
write that book. Had I been working for a publisher, that book never
would have been printed. Assuming I was allowed to write it, the book
would have been split into 9 different books, each one a watered down
shadow of what the book I put out myself currently is.
Tyler: What do you think should be the language for application development and why?
Roland:
That answer really depends upon your platform and the tool set you are
working with. If you decide you only want to work with RMS indexed
files, then hands-down DEC BASIC is the tool of choice. You must be
aware that you have limited the size of both your application and your
company by choosing to use RMS Indexed files rather than a relational
database. Once a single indexed file starts spanning multiple disk
drives it becomes very slow to access.
You decide, for whatever
reason, a primitive relational database will be your data storage method
of choice. You choose MySQL because it is free. You are limited to
C/C++ as your development language on most platforms when using that
database.
If you decide to use the best of the best in database
technology, RDB on an OpenVMS cluster with fully distributed databases,
you can literally choose any language supported on the platform, even
Java as the Java book in this series shows.
In today's world, you
choose your tools first: screen management, database/storage,
messaging. Then you pick one of the languages that work with the tools
you have chosen on the OS you choose to run.
Tyler: For the layperson, would you tell us a bit about OpenVMS and its role in the computer industry?
Roland:
OpenVMS was and still is the most advanced operating system ever
created by mankind. In the 1980's VMS gave the business world clustering
and set the standard so high no other operating system has even come
close to the implementation. There are a lot of OS's and vendors of OS's
who will claim they have "clustering" but it is untrue. They have to
spin a new definition of clustering, in most cases down to "we can spell
the word clustering therefore we must have it." No version of Unix or
Linux actually clusters. This is something Oracle is finding out the
hard way with their RAC10 product and some much publicized travel site
outages.
Were OpenVMS re-introduced today as a brand new operating
system it would set the entire IT industry on its ear. Most of the IT
industry is waking up to the fact that no matter how many $800 PC's you
stick on blades, it is not a stable enough platform to run your company
on.
Tyler: Roland, I must admit, I am not overly computer-savvy,
and I find it difficult to communicate with IT people because of the
jargon and the technicalities of technology. Therefore, I am surprised
and pleased to meet someone who writes books about computers. What made
you decide to be an author about technology?
Roland: It's the
field I work in, and it is highly misunderstood. The industry has been
reduced to 4-color glossies and MBA's making knee-jerk decisions based
upon which product seems to have the most 4-color glossies in the press
this week. We have to change that. There is a very troubling mindset in
upper management that IT workers are just like the box stackers on an
assembly line. This has led to a mad rush to off-shore IT and to flood
this country with H1-B workers. Besides decimating the economy, these
decisions are decimating business. From the 1970's through the 1980's a
company's business edge was its IT department. This defined how your
business ran and let you outrun your competitors. Now there is a trend
to use the exact same software as everyone else. You no longer have a
business edge, so MBA's enter a price war to outdistance their
competitors. All a non-IT person needs to do is read the announcements
from the SEC investigating accounting practices, stock options, and the
rash of other scandals to see where price war mentality puts you.
Doomsday
type people have been preaching we will eventually fight a world war in
the Middle East over oil. If present trends do not change, we will
fight a world war to get our source code and technology back long before
we go to war for oil. Someone needs to put what we will need to recover
from that war in writing long before it happens. They also need to
point out that it is coming.
Despite what the off-shoring
contracts say, many corporations no longer own their software. The data
centers it is hosted in are in another country. If the owners of that
center cut the network links, how does that company continue to
function?
Tyler: Wow, Roland. I never thought about technology
in that global of a way. What do you think is the solution to this
situation? Is the situation something that companies need to solve for
themselves or is government intervention required?
Roland:
Businesses will not solve it for themselves. They have run headlong off
this cliff and are too busy looking for another profitable scam that
will let them avoid prison (like back dated stock options did for
years).
Government intervention will happen, but not for any of
the reasons you might think. Some incredibly large and stupid company
(think Oracle or Microsoft) will have 70-80% of its source hosted on
off-shore services (both of these companies have close to that in
off-shore work now if you can believe the numbers floating around). At
some point an entity or party with a fanatical national policy will take
control of the government in that country and nationalize all of that
source code. (Cuba did this when Castro took over, and other countries
have done the same, so I'm not really stretching anything here).
Imagine
what happens when those multi-million dollar Oracle products are no
being sold as Alah-DB or some other radical name for $50.00/copy.
Massive amounts of campaign funds get deposited to the re-election
campaigns of all federal officials and congress declares war on the
country that did this to protect Oracle (or Microsoft). Tens of
thousands of your sons and daughters come home in body bags because
corporations were both too stupid and too greedy to realize this
off-shoring thing was a bad idea.
Take a look at GM and the other
large companies off-shoring all of the software required for day-to-day
operations. What happens when the third world country they off-shore to
has the same thing happen? Unless GM forks over billions to "license"
the now nationalized software, all of its plants and sales idle, putting
hundreds of thousands out of work all at once. Same thing happens. Campaign contributions change hands and your children start coming home
in body bags.
What scares me the most is that the off-shore
companies themselves are going to force this to happen. Infokall,
USTech, and the other large off-shore companies are built on a model of
what amounts to slave labor. You are seeing articles in the business
magazines about them complaining of talent sniping and a shortage of
skilled developers willing to work for what they are willing to pay.
Most of them are now opening offices in Korea and other countries which
appear third world to Indian standards. These guys will pull out of
their home countries overnight and open the door for some radical group
to be backed by millions of now unemployed IT workers.
The move to Korea was really scary to hear about. U.S. troops have spilled blood there before.
Tyler:
Roland, let's go back to your books. On your website, you state,
"These books give IT people the information we actually need rather than
the information the magazines say we need." What do magazines say IT
people need that they don't, and why do the magazines have it wrong?
Roland:
You have to understand how the "Industry Analyst" and trade magazine
industry have operated for the past two decades to understand why
neither are a good source of information. Both are funded by advertising
dollars; both will deny it, but there it is. When a new product comes
out and a vendor opens up its war chest, its first item of business is
to become a paying subscriber to one or more of the "Industry Analyst"
firms. This gets their product pitched to those in the IT industry
subscribing to the service. It also gets Big-X consulting firms pitching
the new product as well. Tons of articles appear in the weekly trade
press stating how this new product is a Mega-Trend and the greatest
thing to hit the industry since the semi-conductor.
This leads to
knee-jerk decisions that launch countless "pilot projects" at various
companies. These pilot projects all require some form of licensing for
the product. The vendor then publishes this massive number of licenses
being purchased (even if they are short term 120 day things) and
suddenly it really looks like this is a train coming down the mountain
at you. It's not. Until the new product replaces the actual core bread
and butter systems at the company, it is nothing more than a flash in
the pan. It takes a minimum of seven years to replace a core business
system and have it settle in.
A core business system is defined as
the complete flow: Order Entry, Customer Management, Inventory,
Warehousing, Picking, Shipping, and Invoicing.
Let me put it to
you another way. The language with the largest installed base in the
world is COBOL. This is the language of many core business systems.
There are millions of new lines of COBOL code written today and added to
the billions of lines in production already. Exactly how many weekly or
monthly IT magazines do you see writing articles about COBOL? None. It
is a mature technology and doesn't have vast quantities of cash being
dumped into its marketing.
Here is an interesting question for you
to research on your own. Exactly how many college IT courses have COBOL
as a mandatory course?
Tyler: Roland, I'm especially intrigued
by your book "The Minimum You Need to Know About Logic to Work in IT."
Your website suggests that logic isn't taught in college courses
anymore, and consequently most IT people are unemployable. What do you
see is the problem with IT college courses?
Roland: College
courses are hamstrung by a lot of things, most of them fall into two
categories: funding and tenure. I honestly thought that Y2K was going to
fix college courses. There was evidence of it. Two years prior to Y2K
hitting, a couple of forward thinking companies bought an IBM mainframe
for a local junior college. They installed it and provided instructors.
The governing body of the college was informed it would teach this
course and actively recruit students for it. These companies knew that
even graduating 50 students per term, they couldn't satisfy the need
they were about to have inside of two years.
Tenure is a dangerous
trap. It opens the door to some really lazy behavior. If you take a
look at the college text market, the only books professors consider come
completely packaged with test, scantron answer cards, overheads, and
lecture notes. The instructor needs to add almost nothing to the course
and in many cases doesn't.
Colleges don't have massive amounts of
funding; even many of the private colleges only teach what they get for
free when it comes to technology. Supporting a mainframe or midrange
computer requires quite a bit of cash and special computer rooms. It is
cheaper to scatter donated PC's around the campus and teach only what
will run on them for free.
Colleges got trapped into trying to
chase a market funded by a vendor war chest. When businesses said they
needed IT professionals with WEB skills, colleges taught only the WEB
skills. All of the other knowledge IT professionals were assumed to have
didn't get taught. What you ended up with was someone who could design a
really pretty WEB page, but couldn't communicate with the back end
business systems or understand them. Why pay $65K/yr starting salary to a
graduate like that when you can get the same unskilled person in a
third world country for $10/day?
I have found very few colleges
today that teach logic to IT people. The reason is that you can't make
them understand how logic helps them if you aren't going to teach them
the 3GL business system languages like COBOL, BASIC, C, etc. Logic is
hard to understand in a point and click WEB world.
Tyler:
Roland, when I introduced you, I mentioned that you are the president of
Logikal Solutions, a business applications consulting firm specializing
in VMS platforms. As a business consultant, if you were asked by a
university that wanted to start an IT student program, to assist them,
what would you do to make sure the students are prepared for the future?
Roland:
They need to have the students spend their first three weeks (before
committing to the program) studying the growth of off-shore companies,
the labor rates being paid in those countries, and the unemployment rate
among IT workers in the US. They need also to be informed of all the
other career opportunities that are out there. They need to read the
articles that have appeared in business and IT publications stating that
IT workers are now "labor" and not knowledge workers as we were
classified in the 70-80's.
Once the candidates have gone through
that...assuming they start with 3-4000 for those first three weeks, they
need to tell the one student that still wants to learn IT after all of
that to go to another school.
Honestly, given the situation
management has created in this country and globally, I cannot ethically
recommend ANY college student to go into the field of IT. Until a
tragedy of massive proportions happens, IT will not be a rewarding or
well paying field. IT is currently not even respected by corporations
anymore. MBA's sit through a one-day training course on how to create a
contact manager using Microsoft Access, then get their certificate to
manage IT projects. This is how we got where we are.
Personally, I
do not think you will find an IT curriculum being offered at US
colleges in fewer than five years. The last I read is that enrollment is
down over 80% in IT programs nationwide. MBA's have themselves to
thank. Some colleges have completely closed the curriculum and now only
offer a few courses in WEB page design and Java coding for the WEB.
Tyler: What advice would you give today to students interested in pursuing an IT or programming career?
Roland:
Right now, I would tell them not to pursue it. Become a water well
driller or a diesel engine mechanic. IT is headed for a train wreck and
we are less than five years away from it. The mad rush to treat IT
workers like warehouse box stackers has lead to the beating down of IT
salaries and massive amounts of fraud in the H1-B program. A small
backlash against the off-shoring has already started with some high
profile contract cancellations. The big hammer will fall when more H1-B
workers get arrested by Homeland Security for acts of terrorism. After
that happens, the H1-B visa will be abolished. Off-shoring companies
will find themselves tightly restricted. You won't see thousands of IT
workers slipping over here on vacation visas to work many months
tax-free. IT workers will once again be respected as knowledge workers
and salaries will reward those who know.
Tyler: Roland, what makes your books stand out and fulfill a need college courses have missed?
Roland:
Logic is the fundamental tool of IT. If you do not understand logic,
then you do not understand the fundamental principals behind IT. You
didn't earn a degree; you were given one.
Tyler: Roland, I was
surprised to learn your book "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an
OpenVMS Application Developer" is the first book in ten years on the
subject. With the way technology is so rapidly changing, how is it
possible ten years have elapsed without a book being written on the
subject?
Roland: That's easy. HP is the third owner of OpenVMS. It
started out with Digital Equipment Corporation who created an OS that
was 30 years ahead of its time. Compaq then bought DEC, and being a PC
company, had no idea what to do with a midrange system. Finally HP
bought Compaq. HP has had a really sad excuse for a mid-range OS for
many years. You might have heard of it: HP-UX. They sink vast amounts
of money into marketing that lesser product. If that money were put into
marketing OpenVMS, the HP-UX product would disappear inside of three
years. HP is able to perform only maintenance on OpenVMS and have the OS
add millions if not billions to its bottom line.
The installed
base for OpenVMS is large. Companies that use it know what quality is.
They also know the up-time for an OpenVMS cluster is measured in
decades, not hours like it is for a PC network. Some of you may have
read the article in "ComputerWorld" some time back. When the twin towers
fell, the trading companies which were using clustered OpenVMS systems
in multiple locations continued to trade until the end of the trading
day. They had an outage of less than 15 minutes while the cluster
verified the other nodes were not going to respond, then recovered their
transactions and continued on. No other OS provides that level of
"Survive the Fire" design.
Put yourself in the shoes of upper
management at HP. You've sunk billions into this HP-UX thing over the
years. OpenVMS has a large and loyal installed base despite every
company that has tried to eliminate it over the years. Doing almost
nothing for OpenVMS still has it adding millions if not billions to your
annual bottom line. If you push OpenVMS, your flagship HP-UX will
vanish from the market place. Do you tell the world you were wrong or do
you continue sinking millions into HP-UX hoping against hope that it
will one day catch up to OpenVMS?
Tyler: In "The Minimum You Need
to Know About Java on OpenVMS," your first chapter is "Why Java?" Will
you answer that question for us?
Roland: That question is best answered by reading the book.
Tyler:
Roland, overall, what do you think makes your series of books stand
out from all the other books on Java and programming?
Roland: I
wasn't paid to write them. I wrote these books on my own time and
published them with my own money. I wasn't paid by some publisher to
crank out six books per year aimed at the least common denominator of
the marketplace. This left me free to cover the topics I wanted and knew
needed covering.
Tyler: Roland, what do you find most rewarding about programming and writing about our ever-changing technologies?
Roland:
Technology really isn't "ever-changing." That's a phrase the trade
press has been cramming down our throats for decades. Technology is
forever rehashing old and sometimes bad ideas. The most rewarding part
about writing is being able to point out just what idea is being
rehashed this week by the trade press and "industry analysts."
Tyler:
Roland, you have been involved with computers and programming for
twenty years, back to when computers were just becoming common items in
households. You have seen a lot of changes in that time. What have you
found to be the biggest learning curve in keeping up with technology?
Roland:
Convincing MBA's that what they are seeing in a 4-color glossy isn't
new technology, it is a rehash of technology that either didn't survive
or shouldn't be rehashed.
When you read through this series of
books you will find a section where I cover how PC's rehashed mistakes
mainframes and midrange computers made a decade before. You will also
find a section talking about how all of these "new technologies" which
let developers link directly to databases from WEB pages is a one way
ticket to prison just waiting to be punched.
Tyler: Roland, you
seem to have a bleak outlook for technology in the next few years. If
you had a crystal ball, what would be your prediction for what
technology and computers will be like in fifty more years?
Roland:
Fifty is a really long number to look out. DEC had the best minds in
the industry working for it and they only looked 30 years out. There are
really three potential outcomes.
Outcome 1: Greed and corruption
win. There are absolutely no IT jobs in the US, Western Europe, or
England. Only a handful exist in Russia. All IT work is done by what was
once third world nations. They bleed us dry. The former technology
leaders now have a culture that exists of two classes, MBA's and those
making less than $30K/yr no matter whether they build houses or work at
7/11. The domino effect caused by losing the IT workers caused a
complete obliteration of the middle class by wiping out the industries
which relied on them spending money (expensive homes, $70,000 SUV's,
movie and music industry, etc.). It's the second dark ages.
Outcome
2: The SEC saves the world. During a brief respite between industry
wide financial scandals the SEC stumbles into an accounting cover up of
off-shore project failures by a blue chip company. They begin a very
deep and public investigation. Heads of the company go to prison and the
gory story of how papering over off-shore failures was common practice
rattles the investing community. A cursory inspection of all publicly
traded companies turns up that the practice was wide spread. In a
massive plea bargain, all listed companies end their off-shore contracts
within a month, then begin an examination of what systems they have
still actually working. The mainframe and midrange systems still running
their core business systems even after the company publicly declared
they had converted everything to $800 pc's running Windows or Linux turn
out to be the only system still running. A decade of purging happens
during which, students are paid to go to college for core IT skills:
Logic, 3GLs, and relational databases.
Outcome 3: Greed alone
wins. The off-shore companies working in India faced with having to pay
real wages and unionized programmers flash cut their operations over to
Korea and other companies in a week's span of time. Millions of
disgruntled IT workers take to the streets. Extremist groups move in and
recruit them. These are educated people with a little bit of money, not
the usual extremist fair. One or more large US companies finds all of
their software nationalized by a new extremist government. We end up in a
massive war with the outcome uncertain. Everything we want can be
destroyed by a bombing raid or simply deleted by the current government
of the country.
Tyler: Roland, would you tell our readers your web site and what further information they can find there about your books?
Roland: There are actually two sites. For information about the current books they can visit
http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com. For information about other books or my company in general they can visit
http://www.logikalsolutions.com.
Tyler:
Thank you, Roland, for joining me today. It has been a real education. I
hope your books become popular and lead to wiser and better IT
decisions and work.
